Grants talk:Project/UNESCO/Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO 2019-2020

Project Grant proposal submissions due 30 November!

Thanks for drafting your Project Grant proposal. As a reminder, proposals are due on November 30th by the end of the day in your local time. In order for this submission to be reviewed for eligibility, it must be formally proposed. When you have completed filling out the infobox and have fully responded to the questions on your draft, please change status=draft to status=proposed to formally submit your grant proposal. This can be found in the Probox template found on your grant proposal page. Importantly, proposals that are submitted after the deadline will not be eligible for review during this round. If you're having any difficulty or encounter any unexpected issues when changing the proposal status, please feel free to e-mail me at cschillingwikimedia.org or contact me on my talk page. Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi @I JethroBT (WMF):, just to confirm I changed my submission from draft to proposed before the deadline, although I did find it kind of confusing to go into the wikitext and I guess an easy thing to miss for newer people. I'm not really sure what a good solution would be though.... John Cummings (talk) 14:05, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2018

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 2 2018 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through January 2, 2019.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 2 2018 will occur January 3-January 28, 2019. Grantees will be announced March 1, 2018. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Comment

It appears that the project will be mainly focused on activities outside UNESCO. Anything that could have been done at UNESCO has already been completed by now. However the project is still called "Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO". May be a better name is necessary? Ruslik (talk) 16:14, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Ruslik0:, I agree the name isn't a perfect description but I think it is the best option:

1. I will still be physically based at UNESCO HQ
2. There is still a huge amount to do at UNESCO
3. It is very useful when working with UN agencies to be attached to a specific agency and UNESCO is the UN agency with the mandate to promote open licensing
4. The alternatives I can think of are either messy (Wikimedian in Residence for some UN agencies?) or incorrect e.g Wikimedian in Residence for the UN (the UN refers to the UN Secretariat which I don't work at).

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 15:48, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

A few additional questions

The sheer scope of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the amount of need are mind-boggling, and they seem consistent with the strategic direction of the Wikimedia Foundation. With this stated, I have a couple questions about your proposal:

• Can you explain what you mean in your two statements in this claim, "The process of getting the information from UN agencies to Wikipedia is difficult and time consuming. First, Wikimedia’s instructions are often of low quality and/or missing. Second, the Wikimedian community does not have the framework in place for the UN to share their knowledge." I am unclear in the first and second statements you make here, and how they directly relate with the UNESCO needs you identified.
• In your proposal to "Work to share content at large scale from UNESCO," it is unclear what this means in practice. You stated, "We now have the policies and infrastructure in place to share a large amount of content from UNESCO on Wikimedia projects. By the start of this project period UNESCO’s website will have 1.5 million open license web pages." Can you provide an example what this may mean in practice for using these resources as a result of this proposed funding?
• Can you explain what criteria you envision using to measure the success of "Metrics: Establish more connections and relationships between UN agencies. Outcomes: Long term partnerships between UN agencies and Wikimedia organisations."?
• What is your strategy for importing, "all the data from UNESCO to Wikidata"?
• What does "The total the applicants to this grant bring" (row unnumbered) in the budget mean?
• Is the funding from Wikimedia Sweden already approved and in-place for this grant period?
• This seems a huge, ongoing project with many moving parts and data points. Do you have any impact data for how these sources, once integrated into Wiki projects, has had or may have tangible impact? This question may be rhetorical, but more comes out of my attempt to better appreciate this effort in light of the USA and Israel leaving UNESCO this week.

Thank you in advance for your reply and thoughtfulness in this project amidst many obstacles John_Cummings, Anabmap, NavinoEvans, and Seantime. --- FULBERT (talk) 20:12, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi @FULBERT:, thanks very much for taking the time to read through the application, I'm travelling without much internet access this week, I promise to reply on either Friday or early next week. I'm sorry for the delay, thanks again. John Cummings (talk) 17:49, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know John Cummings. --- FULBERT (talk) 18:20, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi @FULBERT:, to answer your questions (in bold):

Can you explain what you mean in your two statements in this claim, "The process of getting the information from UN agencies to Wikipedia is difficult and time consuming. First, Wikimedia’s instructions are often of low quality and/or missing. Second, the Wikimedian community does not have the framework in place for the UN to share their knowledge." I am unclear in the first and second statements you make here, and how they directly relate with the UNESCO needs you identified.

1. Learning how to contribute to Wikimedia projects is difficult, there’s a lot of embedded knowledge in the community and instructions often assume a lot of knowledge, two examples of incomplete instructions relevant to this project are:
   1. How to mass upload of images to Commons
   2. How mass import data into Wikidata from external databases
2. Three examples I can use for missing infrastructure are:
   1. A single page executive summary which provides an overview of Wikimedia projects for potential partner organisations, I started one here but its not complete.
   2. A central place on Wikidata to record datasets that are available from a source and which datasets can and has been imported into Wikidata, we made a start with Dataset Imports but it still needs work.
   3. A step by step guide for organisations who want to share content under an open license and what content can be added to Wikimedia and how.

In your proposal to "Work to share content at large scale from UNESCO," it is unclear what this means in practice. You stated, "We now have the policies and infrastructure in place to share a large amount of content from UNESCO on Wikimedia projects. By the start of this project period UNESCO’s website will have 1.5 million open license web pages." Can you provide an example what this may mean in practice for using these resources as a result of this proposed funding.

Over the past 3 years I’ve been building proofs of concept to show the value of UNESCO sharing content with Wikimedia but this has been at relatively small scale because of the sheer volume of content UNESCO produces. At scale means:

• Images: Mass import of images from UNESCO image libraries, both from the modern photo library and those being digitised by UNESCO archives. We have previously run two competitions to reuse UNESCO images on Wikimedia projects that resulted in a tenfold increase in page views for the content (from 1 million to 10 million page views per month).

• Data: import all the data possible from UNESCO into Wikidata

• Text: This is the most complex content. UNESCO produces a huge amount of valuable information but it just isn’t getting onto Wikipedia, both because of the volume of content and because of UNESCO publishing models (many of their publications are 100s of pages long). UNESCO staff do not have the time to write text themselves in Wikipedia but by open licensing it we can add it directly to Wikipedia. We have developed a process for importing open license text into English, Spanish and French Wikipedia. We have imported text from many publications and have a process to record which text has been imported, but 1.5 million pages is a lot of content. We need to find a way to categorise and/or index these pages, but to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t been done before. I think we will probably start with a subsection of the website and work out a system that is scalable, my guess is we could use an online spreadsheet or possibly Wikidata. We will run competitions to encourage Wikimedia volunteers to explore and reuse the web pages once we have this system implemented.

Can you explain what criteria you envision using to measure the success of "Metrics: Establish more connections and relationships between UN agencies. Outcomes: Long term partnerships between UN agencies and Wikimedia organisations."?

A simpler way to measure this would be the number of projects that come out of collaboration between Wikimedia organisations and UN agencies, this could be as simple as a UN agency promoting a Wiki Loves competition (as UN Secretariat did with Wiki Loves Monuments) or could be a longer more in depth project. This should be fairly straightforward to keep track of these projects as I will be the one promoting opportunities to Wikimedia organisations and providing the introductions.

I’ll also be encouraging Wikimedia organisations to attend UN networking events e.g we had a stand at the Internet Governance Forum and hope to have another at Mobile Learning Week in March. I can then follow up with the Wikimedia people who go to these events to see what projects or activities have come out of their attendance

What is your strategy for importing, "all the data from UNESCO to Wikidata"?

1. We have identified where all the UNESCO data is; on the website, in publications and in UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
2. We have developed Dataset Imports where we will create a record for each of the datasets available.
3. Navino and Sean will then structure the datasets so they can be imported and add them as catalogues to Mix n Mat
4. It is likely we will then run competitions to encourage the community to help with the matching (there is a lot to do here).
5. Once the data is matched Sean and Nav will add the data using QuickStatements
6. They will then create queries in the import record to check the data is imported correctly and allow for maintenance.

What does "The total the applicants to this grant bring" (row unnumbered) in the budget mean?

This refers to the total value of all the equipment and other resource the applicants are bringing to the project, rows 18 and 21 to 26 of the budget table.

Is the funding from Wikimedia Sweden already approved and in-place for this grant period?

The funding from Wikimedia Sweden is approved (see John Anderson’s endorsement). However the ability to do the work for that project is reliant on receiving this grant. This is because the Wikimedia Sweden project would only cover around 2 days per week and I’m only able to get a full time contract at UNESCO (the agreement which gives me a security pass to enter the building).

This seems a huge, ongoing project with many moving parts and data points. Do you have any impact data for how these sources, once integrated into Wiki projects, has had or may have tangible impact? This question may be rhetorical, but more comes out of my attempt to better appreciate this effort in light of the USA and Israel leaving UNESCO this week.

For context the US and Israel stopped funding UNESCO over 3 years ago, this led to serious budget constraints (why I’m applying for this grant and previous grants and not being funded by UNESCO directly), I'm not sure the formal withdrawal recently will have much effect on this project.

For adding UNESCO content to Wikimedia projects we have BaGLAMa 2 to measure the reach of media files link and I have worked with Wikimedia Foundation engineering staff member MusikAnimal who added functionality to MassViews to understand where text from UNESCO is used on different language Wikipedias and the page views for each of these pages. See instructions for an overview of the tool, and the results for UNESCO link. However we lack a metrics tools for measuring Wikidata data on Wikimedia projects which we cannot address directly, but by having high profile partners sharing data we can demonstrate the need for the tool to be developed.

Its much more difficult to measure things like running editathons with ambassadors and other influential people, running exhibitions, promoting Wiki Loves competitions etc. I think that these activities raise the profile of and further legitimise working with Wikimedia as a partner to share knowledge however I don’t know how to measure this yet. I have been in discussion with WMF grants staff about how to do it but don’t have anything concrete yet, but once we work on something I will write up guidance to allow it to be used by other projects.

I hope this answers your questions, please let me know if you'd like any more information or need any clarifications on my answers.

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 21:38, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for these replies to my questions John Cummings. This is all very helpful in understanding what you are proposing. --- FULBERT (talk) 22:16, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO 2019-2020

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	8.0
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	7.2
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	8.0
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	6.8
Additional comments from the Committee: The project perfectly fits with the Wikimedia's strategic priorities and has a significant potential online impact. In addition I can see now that the project's impacts can be sustained even after the grant ends, especially if all other UN agencies switch to CC licenses. Work done till date has been considerable as well as the impact in the overall Wikimedia project. This new funding may expand potential impact intro broader audiences. For a long term impact I think we should look for a more independent UN project, where the maximum amount of UN staff uses Wikimedia-related tools and projects in their day-to-day activities thus improving their own knowledge and sharing even more content to our projects and communities. This is a creative solution to a problem that has persisted to a level that seems ironic given the overall emphasis of the UN at working open. This proposal seems exactly what is needed to move this initiative forward. This is a reiterative project and this year it doesn't propose substantial new activities. The approach is iterative in nature - the main intent behind the project is to complete the work that was started before.The risks are relatively modest, mainly related to whether and when other UN agencies accept CC licenses. The success can be reliably measured. Project plans for proper documentation and engagement with other related or interested communities. Very interesting proposal that seems almost to a bureaucratic level a perfect fit for the UN. This is meant in praise of the grantee understanding the complexities of the organization and presenting a plan that takes all of it into account and realistically work from within to accomplish what is needed. I suggest to have a look in the deliveries of the previous years. The team is able to deliver, the problem is more connected with metrics. I believe all four grantees have ability, experience and skills necessary to execute the project based on their previous experience. The budget appears to be realistic. Budget has improved efficiency from last year as well as more funding from other sources. Very realistic plan given how many moving pieces it has. The experience says that there is not so much community involvement. The project both supports diversity as well as has significant community engagement. Project has well balanced plan to engage all the existing communities. Many potential engagement with local branches of Wikimedia communities and UNESCO-related partners in other areas. Many endorsements and a clear understanding of how the Wikimedia communities work in this area. Slightly in favour to "yes" but I have several concerns with the budget. There is a high cost for the office (this is quite strange because GLAM in general give office for free). I don't know why in the budget John Cummings is present two times and a lot of concerns about IT equipment, There is a sense to buy a new Apple Macbook Pro for a person who operates like an external and (I suppose) only for partial time? If the cost of the venue includes also computers, why every should have a new laptop and also a desktop computer? In addition in the budget there is not the percentage of work. I suppose that John is 100%, and the others? I have the feeling that the budget is quite generous. I am willing to support this UNESCO residence project in its third and the last iteration. Nice overall proposal.

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on March 1st, 2019.

Questions? Contact us.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:44, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Hi @I JethroBT (WMF):, thanks very much for the feedback.

1. Its important to correct a miss-understanding about the budget, (related to the comment starting... Slightly in favour to "yes" but I have several concerns with the budget) to clarify only the lines in the budget table which say WMF in the "Source of funding" line are paid for by WMF. We are requesting €69,846 (42% of total project cost of €167,271) from WMF, the other lines are paid from different sources including UNESCO, Wikimedia Sweden and the grantees.

• The office is provided for free by UNESCO, this includes office services like photocopying, computer supplies, meeting room usage etc.
• The computer supplies are brought in by the grantees, not paid for by WMF, they are existing assets.
• The budget for John Cummings is presented twice because the funding is coming from two sources, WMF and Wikimedia Sweden.

2. Note for the comment The experience says that there is not so much community involvement we have now come up with processes to involve more chapters and usergroups, some examples:

• Wikimedia Norway will be a partner with UNESCO for the International Year of Indigenous Languages.
• Wikimedia Argentina is starting to work with UN OHCHR on work on human rights.
• I've organised a Wikimedia table at Mobile Learning Week (the largest UN ICTs in education conference) which will include representatives from WMF, Kiwix and Wikimedia chapters.
• Myself and Wikimedia Sweden are outlining a process to notify chapters on possibilities of working with UNESCO.

3. Note for the comment I am willing to support this UNESCO residence project in its third and the last iteration, this will not be the last iteration, just the last iteration funded by WMF.

Thanks again

John Cummings (talk) 14:07, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Round 2 2018 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, 69,846.00 EUR / 79,404.77 USD

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to support this partnership as a continued effort to support UNESCO and other governmental entities to release open-license content and to support contributors to both access and improve projects with this content. However, the committee expressed concern that the scope of activities is too large, and has asked that funding be contingent on the following conditions based on the Project Plan section:

• Priority should be placed on activities where the applicants have additional support from other organizations and partners (such as Wikimedia Sweden)
• Priority should be placed on activities that facilitate content improvements on Wikimedia projects
• Time spent on developing tools, practices, and documentation should be limited to cases where there is a known audience who will use these resources, and that the usage can be clearly documented for reporting purposes in this grant. Past work in this area has sometimes resulted in projects and documentation that have not been clearly used in the Wikimedia movement.

Prior to finalizing a contract, we ask that you provide a job description specifically outlining the activities of the WiR role (we are now making this request of all WiRs).

Please note that we consider funding for WiR activities to be short-term. Grant funding that the Wikimedia Foundation provides for WiRs is not intended to support ongoing workflows, but to leverage the partnership to build a sustainable platform that ensures outcomes long after the WiR has completed their service. Their work should secure long-term outcomes that do not depend on ongoing grant funding.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 14:57, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Final report

Is the final report for this project available, I JethroBT (WMF)? Cordless Larry (talk) 08:23, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

@Coordless Larry:, it has not yet been submitted as far as I'm aware. This sounds like a question for the grantees-- @John Cummings, Anabmap, NavinoEvans, and Seantime: I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF), John Cummings, Anabmap, NavinoEvans, and Seantime: is there any update on this? Cordless Larry (talk) 06:53, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Hi all @I JethroBT (WMF), John Cummings, Anabmap, NavinoEvans, Seantime, and Cordless Larry:

Really sorry for missing this before, I didn't get a notification or missed them.

WMF have not approved our 2017-2018 midterm report which means we haven’t submitted our final report for that. We have contacted WMF to request they review the midterm report a few times but they didn’t respond (we think this may be due to changes in staff). https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/John_Cummings/Wikimedian_in_Residence_at_UNESCO_2017-2018/

We didn’t post our midterm report draft for 2019-2020 because we requested WMF review the Google Doc version before we submitted to the wiki, we stopped receiving replies to our emails about it (we assume because of the start of COVID/staff changes) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VyZvOxKDE4cFEQ9truNcaf2I3M4XH1Cm3RYJMiICAr4/edit#

We haven’t prepared a final report for the 2019-2020 project, the project became difficult due to the closure of the UNESCO office and the shift in focus of the UN during the pandemic so we moved onto other projects, although we will finalise the remaining work and the final report quickly because it is mostly done once the midterm reports for 2017-2018 and 2019-2020 are approved.

Currently Nav has not received their second payment (Sean’s work has been moved to Nav) but Ana and myself have. We understand this is due to the 2018-2019 report not being finalised but then Ana got paid anyway, which is quite confusing.

@Chris if this is easier to discuss over email let me know

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 14:35, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Just to keep the on-wiki conversation updated, we have tried contacting I JethroBT (WMF) and the grants admin department by email but have not had any responses yet. We will keep trying, but if anyone has any ideas about who to contact please post a suggestion here. NavinoEvans (talk) 14:40, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

@Mjohnson (WMF) and Jtud (WMF): is there any chance you can help with this? All we need is the Midpoint report to be accepted for our previous 2017-2018 UNESCO grant. Then we can submit the final report. We're currently completely stuck and unable to proceed with the project because my 2nd payment can't be released until the previous grant final report is submitted. NavinoEvans (talk)

Update: We've heard back from everyone at WMF now via email. The 2017-2018 Midpoint report has been approved and we have submitted the final report. NavinoEvans (talk) 08:58, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for chasing this up, NavinoEvans. Cordless Larry (talk) 13:59, 28 August 2022 (UTC)